Cop Hater Page 6

  "Soon, Mrs. Reardon. We don't want to miss any bets. A careful autopsy may put us closer to finding his killer."

  "Yes, I know. I didn't want you to think . . . it's just the family. They ask questions. They don't understand. They don't know what it means to have him gone, to wake up in the morning and not. . . not have him here." She bit her lip and turned her face from Bush. "Forgive me. Mike wouldn't . . . wouldn't like this. Mike wouldn't want me to . . ." She shook her head and swallowed heavily. Bush watched her, feeling sudden empathy for this woman who was Wife, feeling sudden compassion for all women everywhere who had ever had their men torn from them by violence. His thoughts wandered to Alice, and he wondered idly how she would feel if he stopped a bullet, and then he put the thought out of his mind. It wasn't good to think things like that. Not these days. Not after two in a row. Jesus, was it possible there was a nut loose? Somebody who'd marked the whole goddamn precinct as his special target?

  Yes, it was possible.

  It was very damn possible, and so it wasn't good to think about things like Alice's reaction to his own death. You thought about things like that, and they consumed your mind, and then when you needed a clear mind which could react quickly to possible danger, you didn't have it. And that's when you were up the creek without a paddle.

  What had Mike Reardon been thinking of when he'd been gunned down?

  What had been in the mind of David Foster when the four slugs ripped into his body?

  Of course, it was possible the two deaths were unrelated. Possible, but not very probable. The m.o. was remarkably similar, and once the Ballistics report came through they'd know for sure whether they were dealing with one man or two.

  Bush's money was on the one-man possibility.

  "If there's anything else you want to ask me," May said. She had pulled herself together now, and she faced him squarely, her face white, her eyes large.

  "If you'll just collect any address books, photographs, telephone numbers, newspaper clippings he may have saved, anything that may give us a lead onto his friends or even his relatives, I'd be much obliged."

  "Yes, I can do that," May said.

  "And you can't remember anything unusual that may have some bearing on this, is that right?"

  "No, I can't. Detective Bush, what am I going to tell the kids? I sent them off to a movie. I told them their daddy was out on a plant. But how long can I keep it from them? How do you tell a pair of kids that their father is dead? Oh God, what am I going to do?"

  Bush remained silent. In a little while, May Reardon went for the stuff he wanted.

  At 3:42 P.M. on July 25th, the Ballistics report reached Carella's desk. The shells and bullets found at the scene of Mike Reardon's death had been put beneath the comparison microscope together with the shells and bullets used in the killing of David Foster.

  The Ballistics report stated that the same weapon had been used in both murders.

  Chapter EIGHT

  on the night that David Foster was killed, a careless mongrel searching for food in garbage cans had paused long enough to sully the sidewalk of the city. The dog had been careless, to be sure, and a human being had been just as careless, and there was a portion of a heelprint for the Lab boys to work over, solely because of this combined record of carelessness. The Lab boys turned to with something akin to distaste.

  The heelprint was instantly photographed, not because the boys liked to play with cameras, but simply because they knew accidents frequently occurred in the making of a cast. The heelprint was placed on a black-stained cardboard scale, marked off in inches. The camera, supported above the print by a reversible tripod, the lens parallel to the print to avoid any false perspectives, clicked merrily away. Satisfied that the heelprint was now preserved for posterity—photographically, at least—the Lab boys turned to the less antiseptic task of making the cast.

  One of the boys filled a rubber cup with half a pint of water. Then he spread plaster of Paris over the water, taking care not to stir it, allowing it to sink to the bottom of its own volition. He kept adding plaster of Paris until the water couldn't absorb anymore of it, until he'd dumped about ten ounces of it into the cup. Then he brought the cup to one of the other boys who was preparing the print to take the mixture.

  Because the print was in a soft material, it was sprayed first with shellac and then with a thin coat of oil. The plaster of Paris mixture was stirred and then carefully applied to the prepared print. It was applied with a spoon in small portions. When the print was covered to a thickness of about one-third of an inch, the boys spread pieces of twine and sticks onto the plaster to reinforce it, taking care that the debris did not touch the bottom of the print and destroy its details. They then applied another coat of plaster to the print, and allowed the cast to harden. From time to time, they touched the plaster, feeling for warmth, knowing that warmth meant the cast was hardening.

  Since there was only one print, and since it was not even a full print, and since it was impossible to get a Walking Picture from this single print, and since the formula

  r ra rv raa 11 Ib

  H -- BS --- --- ---- --- --- X,

  l la Iv laa rl rb

  a formula designed to give the complete picture of a man's walk in terms of step length, breadth of step, length of left foot, right foot, greatest width of left foot, right foot, wear on heel and sole—since the formula could not be applied to a single print, the Lab boys did all they could with what they had.

  And they decided, after careful study, that the heel was badly worn on the outside edge, a peculiarity which told them the man belonging to that heel undoubtedly walked with a somewhat duck-like waddle. They also decided that the heel was not the original heel of the shoe, that it was a rubber heel which had been put on during a repair job, and that the third nail from the shank side of the heel, on the left, had been bent when applying the new heel.

  And—quite coincidentally if the heelprint happened to have been left by the murderer—the heel bore the clearly stamped trade name "O'Sullivan," and everyone knows that O'Sullivan is America's Number One Heel.

  The joke was an old one. The Lab boys hardly laughed at all.

  The newspapers were not laughing very much, either.

  The newspapers were taking this business of cop-killing quite seriously. Two morning tabloids, showing remarkable versatility in headlining the same incident, respectively reported the death of David Foster with the words SECOND COP SLAIN and KILLER SLAYS 2ND COP.

  The afternoon tabloid, a newspaper hard-pressed to keep up with the circulation of the morning sheets, boldly announced KILLER ROAMS STREETS. And then, because this particular newspaper was vying for circulation, and because this particular newspaper made it a point to "expose" anything which happened to be in the public's eye at the moment—anything from Daniel Boone to long winter underwear, anything which gave them a free circulation ride on the then-popular bandwagon—their front page carried a red banner that day, and the red banner shouted "The Police Jungle—What Goes On In Our Precincts" and then in smaller white type against the red, "See Murray Schneider, p. 4."

  And anyone who had the guts to wade through the first three pages of cheesecake and chest-thumping liberalism, discovered on page four that Murray Schneider blamed the deaths of Mike Reardon and David Foster upon "the graft-loaded corruptness of our filth-ridden Gestapo."

  In the graft-loaded Squad Room of the corrupt 87th Precinct, two detectives named Steve Carella and Hank Bush stood behind a filth-ridden desk and pored over several cards their equally corrupt fellow-officers had dug from the Convictions File.

  "Try this for size," Bush said.

  "I'm listening," Carella said.

  "Some punk gets pinched by Mike and Dave, right?"

  "Right."

  "The judge throws the book at him, and he gets room and board from the State for the next five or ten years. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Then he gets out. He's had a lot of time to mull this over, a lo
t of time to build up his original peeve into a big hate. The one thing in his mind is to get Mike and Dave. So he goes out for them. He gets Mike first, and then he tries to get Dave quick, before this hate of his cools down. Wham, he gets Dave, too."

  "It reads good," Carella said.

  "That's why I don't buy this Flannagan punk."

  "Why not?"

  'Take a look at the card. Burglary, possession of burglary tools, a rape away back in '47. Mike and Dave got him on the last burglary pinch. This was the first time he got convicted, and he drew ten, just got out last month on parole after doing five years."

  "So."

  "So I don't figure a guy with a big hate is going to be good enough to cut ten years to five. Besides, Flannagan never carried a gun all the while he was working. He was a gent."

  "Guns are easy to come by?'

  "Sure. But I don't figure him for our man."

  "I'd like to check him out, anyway," Carella said.

  "Okay, but I want to check this other guy out first Or-diz. Luis 'Dizzy' Ordiz. Take a look at the card."

  Carella pulled the conviction card closer. The card was a 4x6 white rectangle, divided into printed rectangles of various sizes and shapes.

  "A hophead," Carella said.

  "Yeah. Figure the hate a hophead can build hi four years' time."

  "He went the distance?"

  "Got out the beginning of the month," Bush said. "Cold turkey all that time. This don't build brotherly love for the cops who made the nab."

  "No, it doesn't."

  "Figure this, too. Take a look at his record. He was picked up in '51 on a dis cond charge. This was before he got on the junk, allegedly. But he was carrying a .45. The gun had a busted hammer, but it was still a .45. Go back to '49. Again, dis cond, fighting in a bar. Had a .45 on him, no busted hammer this time. He got off lucky that time. Suspended sentence."

  "Seems to favor .45's."

  "Like the guy who killed Mike and Dave. What do you say?"

  "I say we take a look. Where is he?"

  Bush shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine."

  Danny Gimp was a man who'd had polio when he was a child. He was lucky in that it had not truly crippled him. He had come out of the disease with only a slight limp, and a nickname which would last him the rest of his life. His real surname was Nelson, but very few people knew that, and he was referred to in the neighborhood as Danny Gimp. Even his letters came addressed that way.

  Danny was fifty-four years old, but it was impossible to judge his age from his face or his body. He was very small, small all over, his bones, his features, his eyes, his stature. He moved with the loose-hipped walk of an adolescent, and his voice was high and reedy, and his face bore hardly any wrinkles or other telltale signs of age.

  Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon.

  He was a very valuable man, and the men of the 87th Precinct called him in regularly, and Danny was always ready to comply—whenever he could. It was a rare occasion when Danny could not supply the piece of information the bulls were looking for. On these occasions, there were other stool-ies to talk to. Somewhere, somebody had the goods. It was simply a question of finding the right man at the right time.

  Danny could usually be found in the third booth on the right hand side of a bar named Andy's Pub. He was not an alcoholic, nor did he even drink to excess. He simply used the bar as a sort of office. It was cheaper than paying rent someplace downtown, and it had the added attraction of a phone booth which he used regularly. The bar, too, was a good place to listen—and listening was one-half of Danny's business. The other half was talking.

  He sat opposite Carella and Bush, and first he listened.

  Then he talked.

  "Dizzy Ordiz," be said. "Yeah, yeah."

  "You know where he is?"

  "What'd he do?"

  "We don't know."

  "Last I heard, he was on the state."

  "He got out at the beginning of the month."

  "Parole?"

  "No."

  "Ordiz, Ordiz. Oh, yeah. He's a junkie."

  "That's right."

  "Should be easy to locate. What'd he do?"

  "Maybe nothing," Bush said. "Maybe a hell of a lot."

  "Oh, you thinking of these cop kills?" Danny asked.

  Bush shrugged.

  "Not Ordiz. You're barkin' up the wrong tree."

  "What makes you say so?"

  Danny sipped at his beer, and then glanced up at the rotating fan. "You'd never know there was a fan going in this dump, would you? Jesus, this heat don't break soon, I'm headin' for Canada. I got a friend up there. Quebec. You ever been to Quebec?"

  "No," Bush said.

  "Nice there. Cool."

  "What about Ordiz?"

  "Take him with, me, he wants to come," Danny said, and then he began laughing at his own joke.

  "He's cute today," Carella said.

  "I'm cute all the time," Danny said. "I got more dames lined up outside my room than you can count on an abacus. I'm the cutest."

  "We didn't know you was pimping," Bush said.

  "I ain't. This is all for love."

  "How much love you got for Ordiz?"

  "Don't know him from a hole in the wall. Don't care to, either. Hopheads make me puke."

  "Okay, then where is he?"

  "I don't know yet. Give me some time."

  "How much time?"

  "Hour, two hours. Junkies are easy to trace. Talk to a few pushers, zing, you're in. He got out the beginning of the month, huh? That means he's back on it strong by now. This should be a cinch."

  "He may have kicked it," Carella said. "It may not be such a cinch."-

  "They never kick it," Danny said. "Don't pay attention to fairy tales. He was probably gettin' the stuff sneaked in even up the river. I'll find him. But if you think he knocked off your buddies, you're wrong."

  "Why?"

  "I seen this jerk around. He's a nowhere. A real trom-benik, if you dig foreign. He don't know enough to come in out of an atom bomb attack. He got one big thing hi his life. Horse. That's Ordiz. He lives for the White God. Only thing on his mind."

  "Reardon and Foster sent him away," Carella said.

  "So what? You think a junkie bears a grudge? All part of the game. He ain't got time for grudges. He only got time for meetin' his pusher and makin' the buy. This guy Ordiz, he was always half-blind on the stuff. He couldn't see straight enough to shoot off his own big toe. So he's gonna cool two cops? Don't be ridic."

  "We'd like to see him, anyway," Bush said.

  "Sure. Do I tell you how to run headquarters? Am I the commissioner? But this guy is from Squaresville, fellas, I'm telling you. He wouldn't know a .45 from a cement mixer."

  "He's owned a few in his life," Carella said.

  "Playing with them, playing with them. If one of them things ever went off within a hundred yards of him, he'd have diarrhea for a week. Take it from me, he don't care about nothin' but heroin. Listen, they don't call him Dizzy for nothin'. He's dizzy. He's got butterflies up here. He chases them away with H."

  "I don't trust junkies," Bush said.

  "Neither do I," Danny answered. "But this guy ain't a killer, take it from me. He don't even know how to kill time."

  "Do us a favor," Carella said.

  "Sure."

  "Find him for us. You know our number." "Sure. I'll buzz you in an hour or so. This is gonna be a cinch. Hopheads are a cinch."

  Chapter NINE

  the heat on that July 26th reached a high of 95.6 at twelve noon. At the precinct house, two fans circulated the soggy air that crawled past the open windows and the grilles behind them. Everything in the Detective Squad Room seemed to wilt under the steady, malignant pressure of the heat. Only the file cabinets and the desks stood at strict attention. Reports, file cards, carbon paper, envelopes, memos, all of these were damp and sticky to the touch, clinging to wherever they were dropped, clinging with a moist limpidity.

  The men in the Squad
Room worked in their shirt sleeves. Their shirts were stained with perspiration, large dark amoeba blots which nibbled at the cloth, spreading from beneath the armpits, spreading from the hollow of the spinal column. The fans did not help the heat at all. The fans circulated the suffocating breath of the city, and the men sucked in the breath and typed up their reports in triplicate, and checked their worksheets, and dreamt of Summers in the White Mountains, or Summers in Atlantic City with the ocean slapping their faces. They called complainants, and they called suspects, and their hands sweated on the black plastic of the phone, and they could feel Heat like a living thing which invaded their bodies and seared them with a million white-hot daggers.

  Lieutenant Byrnes was as hot as any man in the Squad Room. His office was just to the left of the slatted dividing railing, and it had a large corner window, but the window was wide open and not a breath of a breeze came through it. The reporter sitting opposite him looked cool. The reporter's name was Savage, and the reporter was wearing a blue seersucker suit and a dark blue Panama, and the reporter was smoking a cigarette and casually puffing the smoke up at the ceiling where the heat held it in a solid blue-grey mass.

  "There's nothing more I can tell you," Byrnes said. The reporter annoyed him immensely. He did not for a moment believe that any man on this earth had been born with a name like "Savage." He further did not believe that any man on this earth, on this day, could actually be as cool as Savage pretended he was.

  "Nothing more, Lieutenant?" Savage asked, his voice very soft. He was a handsome man with close-cropped blond hair and a straight, almost-feminine nose. His eyes were grey, cool. Cool.

  "Nothing," the Lieutenant said. "What the hell did you expect? If we knew who did it, we'd have him in here, don't you think?"

  "I should imagine so," Savage said. "Suspects?"

  "We're working on it."

  "Suspects?" Savage repeated.

  "A few. The suspects are our business. You splash them on your front page, and they'll head for Europe."

  "Think a kid did it?"

  "What do you mean, a kid?"

  "A teen-ager."

  "Anybody could've done it," Byrnes said. "For all I know, you did it."

  Savage smiled, exposing bright white teeth. "Lots of teenage gangs in this precinct, aren't there?"